Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Is Oprah right? Is our culture all screwed up?

I saw the last twenty minutes of Oprah the other day. Her guests were the parents who'd been arrested for hiring a stripper for their son's 16th birthday. This had turned their lives upside down and the father had even had to contend with possibly being cited as a sex offender.

While the parents from this vantage point could agree that this was possibly not the best parenting decision they'd ever made, they were by and large trying to be good parents. Part of their arguement for why they did this was "If this type of thing was going to happen, they wanted it to happen in the safety of their own home". This then steered the conversation to Oprah's eventual comment that "Our culture is all screwed up!"

As I heard her say this, I thought...she's right. What do you think?Of course, I come from the perspective of the Life Puzzle model...and for years I've been saying "Our culture doesn't teach what we need to know to create whole and dynamic lives". We spend so much time learning junk and so little in the skills and knowledge we need.

So, Oprah...here's the reality. Yes, we have a 0-5, reactive, wait til its broke, unconscious, do what everyone else is doing culture. We COULD have a 6-10 proactive, design a life that is conscious of the whole--physical, emotional, thinking, sexual and spiritual. And we could learn how to create lives that each and every day honor the whole we are becoming. And I think your show has done more than almost anyone to at least present that option to people--but its clear there's more needed. Life Puzzle..putting the pieces together is ready now! Every day I'm trying to find ways to 'expand the view' so we can get out of the 'crazy', screwed up world and into a healthy, whole and dynamic way of living.

To do that I've now added on-line classes--live classes that I teach, we talk to each other on phone lines and together we focus on "filling in the pieces" of our lives so we can take charge!